iconic monumentalism

Towards the end of the last century major cultural institutions established themselves as generators of urban activity rather than just repositories for artefacts and information. Architecture is central to this role. As the new century progresses, the architecture of high culture is evolving still further, and a new museum now carries with it the weight of cultural expectation, anticipated by both critics and town planners as a potent symbol of place, be it a district, city or even a whole country.

Iconic monumentalism was a reaction against the anodyne Modernism that had become the de facto house style of museology. Sober, self-effacing, functional museum architecture stems from the Bauhaus-era fascination with purity and simplicity. The gradual reduction of the decorated façade into a muted, abstract composition took place in parallel with the most significant American art movement of the postwar era, Abstract Expressionism, an integration epitomized by Philip Johnson’s Rothko Chapel in Houston (1971), a self-consciously pared-down structure built to house a Mark Rothko triptych. Art overflowed the constraints of the canvas; architecture followed meekly.

more from Frieze here.

Comments

[David Sucher]

I like your site but I wish you folks added some more commentary to the excerpts/links. For example, this one. Is it offered dryly as an example of the emptiness of architectural criticism? Or was the some value in the article at Frieze which passed me by?

His assessment of MOMA, for example, strikes me as inaccurate, if nothing else. The building is not in the least "commercial" -- which is exactly one of its flaws. I mean in the sense that a commercial building might have been less walled-away from the city.